ABSTRACTInspired by challenges we faced in an undergraduate community-literacy cohort, we theorize “epideictic listening” as an important concept for articulating the range of listening strategies necessary both for our work in local public schools and for sustaining the cohort’s internal cohesion. Through critical reflection, we (faculty and student coauthors) offer a definition of “epideictic listening” that draws from, but also distinguishes itself from, other theoretical frameworks, such as rhetorical listening and community listening. We situate epideictic listening within the larger rhetorical tradition of epideixis. We end with a concrete application for epideictic listening—the debrief—and gesture toward the larger significance for epideictic listening in community settings.KEYWORDS: Debriefepideictic listeningepideixisethosrhetorical listening Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ABSTRACTThis research demonstrates how public memorializing can enable practices of the undercommons. Using the Equal Justice Initiative’s Soil Collection Community Remembrance Project as our case study, we demonstrate how coalition-building shapes memory in the creation, rather than viewing, of memorial artifacts. We argue that the Soil Collection CRP enables two practices of the undercommons, Black study and unsettling grounds, and we contribute to conversations in rhetoric, ecology, and memory by offering a geologic approach that emphasizes the erosive quality of time.KEYWORDS: Black studycoalitiongeologypublic memorysoilundercommons AcknowledgmentsThe authors thank the College of Arts & Sciences and Humanities Center at the University of San Diego, E. Johanna Hartelius, Joshua Trey Barnett, Margaret E. Solace, and the anonymous reviewers. We also thank the Equal Justice Initiative and its participants for preserving this memory.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This essay argues for a (re)turn to the potential of hypertext by entangling it with/in material rhetorics. A (re)turning—turning over again—troubles and decolonizes traditional understandings of hypertext as either technological product or trope by demonstrating how hypertextuality is [also] a matter of matter. More specifically, this essay uses ethnography as “deep theorization” to extend Angela Haas’s notion of wampum-as-hypertext. I analyze the hypertextual rhetoricity of matter in students’ digital learning environments and demonstrate how these places iteratively become agential and transformative, thus (re)making the digital learning experience. This theorization of digital-learning-spaces-as-hypertexts draws attention to the need to (re)conceptualize digital spaces in terms beyond that of efficiency and carefully (re)consider what it means to [better] teach with/in digitally mediated environments.

ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.

This essay conceptualizes and applies a theory of rhetorical debility to new materialist rhetorical studies. Drawing from critical disability studies, rhetorical debility frames the ways that hierarchical human and nonhuman relations can inhibit certain rhetoricities while enabling others under neoliberalism. This theory extends the concept of “rhetorical capacities,” located within a genealogy of new materialist and posthuman thought in rhetorical studies, in response to intersectional critique of new materialism from Indigenous scholars and disability studies. The essay demonstrates rhetorical debility’s applicability to transnational sites of oppression along axes of disability, colonialism, and neoliberalism through a case study analysis of Palestinian protest rhetoric.

This essay applies Craig Rood’s concept of rhetorical closure to the specific case study of the creation of feminist discourse communities to discuss sexuality. It looks at the editorial policies of two feminist discourse communities in order to more broadly analyze the ways that rhetorical closure operates constitutively along with invitational rhetoric. It connects these issues to past and current debates about censorship, echo chambers, safe spaces, and trigger warnings in order to show when and how rhetorical closure is intended to prevent harm. Like Rood, I do not resolve questions on distinguishing the effectiveness or ethics of rhetorical closure. Examining a radical feminist periodical of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first-century feminist blogosphere shows how invitational rhetoric works with and as rhetorical closure.

This essay investigates the extent to which an “ecological turn” in rhetorical studies—a turn toward systemic understandings of circulation and material interrelation—enables us to understand the ways that rhetors transform the networked public sphere. The essay argues that while ecological models have helped attune us to the complex, ever-shifting interrelations that constitute networked environments, they have demonstrated limitations. Specifically, ecological models have deemphasized (1) the historical specificity of rhetorical ecologies, (2) the role that social imaginaries play in structuring rhetorical ecologies, and (3) the ways that rhetors collectively invest in transforming rhetorical ecologies. Drawing on a qualitative study of activism on Twitter, this essay advocates the development of an infrastructural politics, an approach that emphasizes the ecological qualities of public rhetoric—dispersion, complexity, and emergence—while also attuning us to the collective and ethical dimensions of practicing rhetoric in today’s networked public sphere.

This essay suggests one way of further pushing the methodological boundaries in the study of transnational cyber-public activist rhetoric, which is to complement a new materialist approach with materialist theories rooted in local rhetorical traditions, especially those in non-Western rhetorics. To this end, the author develops a framework named a comparative materialist approach that dynamically recontextualizes the rhetorically charged material actant as it emerges, circulates, transforms, activates the public, and assembles bodies across national, geopolitical, technological, and rhetorical borders. The author then illustrates the comparative materialist approach through a case study of the 2018 anti-Dolce & Gabbana campaign through the lens of “shi”—a rhetorical concept of material propensity originated in different schools of thought during the Warring States period in China.

Energy Darwinism is a metaphor used in economic discourse that proposes markets will naturally become greener and cleaner as fossil fuel costs increase. Influenced by Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, I perform a close reading of the metaphor to analyze its presence in two Citigroup reports. Based on this reading, I argue that the Energy Darwinism metaphor anthropomorphizes markets as acting subjects whose economic autonomy should not be violated and supports the cleansing of industry’s environmental sins. These features of Energy Darwinism construct what I call neoliberal piety, which frames environmental restoration not as inherently valuable but as a by-product of economic success and technological progress. The Energy Darwinism metaphor provides an important case study for analyzing contemporary energy discourse, the rhetorical obstacles that prevent imagining sustainable futures, and the ways we might rework neoliberal assumptions in service of those sustainable futures.

This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

Rhetoricians have paid increasing attention to the influence of materiality and context on rhetorical action. However, such attention has yet to infiltrate discussions of constitutive rhetoric. This essay examines Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a case study for developing audience cultivation as a metaphor for analyzing audience development. This metaphor allows scholars to better account for the historical and material contexts that shape rhetorical efforts. Through analyses of Child’s and other contemporary cookbooks, as well as rigorous attention to the political, economic, social, and cultural forces at play in midcentury American life, I argue that Child’s success is not solely the product of her rhetorical prowess or charisma, but also the product of a constellation of extra-discursive elements that both enabled and constrained her rhetorical efforts.

Comparative rhetoricians are heavily involved in textual interpretation, and the quality of the interpretation largely depends on how self-reflexive the interpreter is. However, within the disciplines of textual studies there is little specific guidance on how to improve self-reflexivity. This essay is intended to ameliorate this situation by drawing on and synthesizing the relevant literatures from such areas as cultural anthropology, qualitative research, and critical theory. I begin by outlining the disputes over the concept of self-reflexivity. I then move to the different spheres that have been proposed for self-reflexivity; these spheres range from accidents of individual psychology to historical circumstances to webs of power and privilege. Next I describe the most useful techniques for refining self-reflexivity, mapping out their theoretical and practical complexities. Throughout the essay I pull from my work on traditional Chinese rhetoric for cautionary examples. I conclude with some words of warning and of encouragement.

Journalists contribute in many routine ways to public controversies, ways that are often overlooked in traditional criticism. They have tended to be overlooked in part because of the agonistic argument dialogue that functions as a tacit, a priori location for controversy, and in part because of the tendency of traditional critics to treat news texts as reflections of controversy rather than contributions to it. This essay examines in detail journalists' entextualization and recontextualization of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's discourse from a press conference on September 22, 1999 in order to explain one way that they contributed to the Brooklyn Museum controversy. The analysis adopts a constitutive attitude toward controversy, asking how our habits of talking and writing contribute to our impressions of a controversy as an autonomous cultural phenomenon.

Using Colin Powell's 2003 pre-war speech to the UN as a case study, this essay illustrates ways in which discourse analytic methods can serve investigations of constitutive rhetoric. Prior to the speech, Powell's reluctance to go to war and his skepticism of the need for military action in Iraq was well known. His conversion to the administration's position was key to the persuasiveness of the speech. Thus, within the speech he needed to reconstitute his ethos from doubter to advocate. The analysis focuses on how specific linguistic qualities such as modality, positioning, narrative, and evaluation assist Powell in doing so. These discourse analytic tools reveal ways in which discrete linguistic moves contribute to the constitutive work of ethos formation and re-formation.

In 1885, William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, printed an exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” This incendiary article helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment bill, but also garnered accusations of pornography against the “Maiden Tribute.” Using Stead's four-part article as a case study, I develop a rhetorical understanding of pornography to account for the dynamic political energy and outrage generated by this text. I argue that the pornography of the “Maiden Tribute” managed to create a particular ignorance, one in which sexuality was isolated from material economic realities. Ultimately, Stead's mission proved politically deleterious to the very women he professed to help.

As rhetorical scholars increasingly investigate traditions and texts from other cultures, new challenges arise as to what method one ought to follow when practicing what is called comparative rhetoric. In this article, I argue that pragmatism offers a framework for a methodology of comparative rhetoric that allows for the plurality of purposes involved on all sides of the encounter between a critic and a text. I will explore how pragmatism gives primacy to the plurality of purposes in human communicative endeavors, as well as what this means for how one can practice comparative rhetoric. I conclude by analyzing a case study in comparative rhetoric involving experiential rhetorical tactics in classical Indian and European philosophical texts.

This article attempts to analyze the ineffable quality of ethos in a case study anout Frances Willard, contending that she succeeded with conservative middle-class audiences by invoking the ethos of the Methodist woman preacher, which she may have learned from her mentor Phoebe Palmer. Methodism encouraged women's moral activism, and Palmer, foreshadowing Willard's agenda, worked for many causes, all the while maintaining a genteel True-Womanly persona. Willard testified to Palmer's spiritual influence on her, and her speaking style also reflected Palmer's blend of intense commitment, spiritual restraint, refined appearance, sound logic, and seemingly artless eloquence. Both women's rhetoric came to seem dated in their final years, yet both left lasting legacies of social change in their communities.

Abstract This essay offers a phenomenological assessment of the moral and rhetorical nature of acknowledgment. The dynamics of acknowledgment arise with the ontological structure of human existence, with our way of being spatial and temporal creatures whose existence, in an epideictic display, opens us to the future. From out of this openness comes a call of conscience, an evocation and a provocation that speaks to us of the importance of an essential vocation: teaching. Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie is offered as a case study of this entire process.

Abstract This essay analyzes the web of persuasion named the “knowledge enthymeme”; in the public policy debate over mandatory newborn HIV testing in the United States and especially New York. Bringing together classical rhetorical theory and Foucault's theory of the knowledge‐power loop, the essay explains how the conceptual/argumentative frame of the knowledge enthymeme helped shape the knowledge‐power relations of mandatory newborn testing in dangerous ways. Ultimately, the knowledge enthymeme blocked more responsive approaches to testing by exaggerating the beneficial effects of testing and its knowledge, ignoring the contingenices of this knowledge, and bypassing the “situated knowledges “ of the women it targets.

A though there was a hiatus of several decades in the early part of the Twentieth Century in which little work was done on the rhetoric of the early Church, there has been a healthy revival of interest in the subject and the number of studies is growing rapidly. Robert Grant's Greek Apologists of the Second Century, Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church, George Kennedy's Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors, William Schoedel's Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Adversus Haereses of and Pheme Perkins' Ireneus and the Gnostics: Rhetoric and Composition in Adversus Haereses Book One represent only a very limited listing of recent work. Some of these works present studies of relatively long sweeps of time (Cameron, Brown, Gamble, Kennedy), while others focus on restricted time frames (Grant) or individuals (Schoedel, Perkins). I come to this body of scholarship not as an historian but as a rhetorical theorist interested in studying the rhetoric practiced by leaders within orthodoxies. The development of the early Church and the rhetoric used by those instrumental in its formation provide an excellent case study from which characteristics of such rhetoric can be gleaned and used to explain the formation of orthodoxies in our own day. A typical episode in the rhetoric of orthodoxy is to identify those who appear to be legitimate insiders, but are not, and to expose them as alien. In the last quarter of the Second Century C.E., Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote an extended treatise, consisting of five books, titled Adversus Haereses, commonly titled Against Heresies in English and abbreviated as AH. 1 The purpose of this work, he says, is to protect the sheep from certain men who outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (Irenaeus AH I, Preface, 2). The first book contains a summary of the tenets of various heretical sects, the second consists of arguments, based on reason, that destroy the validity of these heretical doctrines, and the three remaining books set forth the doctrines of the orthodox faith in contrast with the teachings of the heretics. My present objective is to investigate the rhetorical strategies employed by Irenaeus and in so doing to describe a theory of rhetorical expose. Because Against Heresies is quite long and because much of the expose portion of the work is in Book I, I have restricted my analysis primarily to that book.